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> In his press conference today, Governor Cuomo revealed the preliminary results of a first-phase antibody test that surveyed 3,000 New Yorkers over two days in

• t2riRXawYxLGGYb 7y ago
  This was my thought exactly. Some of my friends in the Bay area got COVID-19 (confirmed positive tests) after quarantining for over two weeks at home and taking all of the precautions. The only place they had been was the grocery store, so they suspect that they got it there.
  • usaar333 7y ago
    Are they not taking public transit? Your friends must be some of the most unlucky people ever. The Bay Area has had under 3k cases since the start of April outside group living settings (nursing homes, homeless shelters, etc.). That's ~1/2000 chance of getting covid from anywhere outside.
    • Terretta 7y ago
      Remember that’s not a count of cases. That’s a count of the under 3000 people that came up positive after permitted to take a limited availability test. Take total case deaths, divide by CFR, that’s how many likely total infected there were 3 weeks ago, and then compound daily by the daily spread rate to find how many likely today.
  • mhandley 7y ago
    The incubation period runs out to around 27 days, though above 2 weeks is uncommon. It seems possible one of them already had it before quarantine, and just happened to be one of those who had a long incubation period. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-incubation-period/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-incuba...
    • tomatocracy 7y ago
      I obviously don’t know whether that’s the case here but its also possible that some of these anecdotal stories (I’ve heard similar from colleagues) involve someone in the same household having had an asymptomatic case acquired prior to quarantining and transmitting it to others in the same household who then get symptoms after a week or two.
  • killion 7y ago
    I'm in the East Bay and was quarantining for almost a month before my symptoms showed. I also assume I got it at the grocery store since that was my only outing.
• arrrg 7y ago
  The death rate of 0.5% falls right in the range of what modelers have been using, by the way. Not exactly very positive news.
  • nikolay 7y ago
    Yeah, still 150,000 death toll if everybody gets infected. And this is not considering the permanent lung and other tissue damage that's getting reported from "recovered" patients.
    • hcknwscommenter 7y ago
      You are one order of magnitude too low at 150,000. It's much worse than that.
      • nikolay 7y ago
        Yes, you're right.
  • newacct583 7y ago
    Right. Really this study is just confirming (with higher error bars than we'd like) what we already strongly suspected. Note that as others are pointing out, that 0.5% isn't really extrapolated correctly. The tested case deaths are looking like they're only 70% of the total or so. Also using a current death count with contemporary infection counts is a mismatch, because it forgets that ~35% of the people currently in the hospital won't ever leave, which is about 5k more deaths. So a better calibrated CFR might be 1% or so, which is even closer to the range we've all been assuming.
    • usaar333 7y ago
      Except this data is also lagging by three weeks, depending on what antibodies are being checked. Some deaths today have come from infections in April, so the net effect could be a wash. And where are you getting a 35% death rate for "ever hospitalized"? It's realistically somewhere around 15%-20%, though with major age skew. (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30243-7/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...)
• shironineja 7y ago
  So if 100% of the USA gets it at 330 M people that amounts to: 1,650,000 deaths. It is unlikely 100% will catch it from a single wave however.
  • wh1t3n01s3 7y ago
    Herd immunity will cap the total %! The second wave will be less contagious where current infection rate is higher.
    • caoilte 7y ago
      You don't get herd immunity until you hit at least 70%so that isn't very reassuring
    • missedthecue 7y ago
      Currently almost 100% of Americans have not caught and recovered from covid-19. Herd immunity is a long ways off.
  • CubsFan1060 7y ago
    Which is about 1/2 of what die in a normal year. The real question is how much do those circles overlap. Are we saving lives, or are people now dying in June that would have died in November anyway?
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • phyzome 7y ago
      There's a metric called something like "estimated years of life lost" based on mortality rate by age and life expectancy, but you'd also want to factor in individual life expectancy—a lot of the people dying from this already had other health conditions.
    • digitaltrees 7y ago
      Yes more people will live if they have access to care because the system isn’t overwhelmed. People in the later stages will also benefit from the institutional knowledge hospitals gain from treating patients. There will also be more PPE and essential medication that will make treatment more effective. Time is our ally.
• TheBlight 7y ago
  Sure all of these studies are potentially flawed but they're all generally pointing in the same direction. There are many more infections than we know about and the CFR is not anywhere close to the actual IFR. NYC is an outlier with a 21% infection estimate but for the rest of NY (outside NYC metro/Westchester/LI) the estimate is 3.6%. Santa Clara estimate was 3%. LA County estimate was 4%. Seems like a trend is developing.
  • slg 7y ago
    >There are many more infections than we know about and the CFR is not anywhere close to the actual IFR. That is the optimistic takeaway. The pessimistic takeaway is that even the hardest hit areas are nowhere near herd immunity levels and that we are either going to be isolating until a vaccine is created or we can expect to see a lot more death once nonessential people are forced back to work.
    • arcticbull 7y ago
      > The pessimistic takeaway is that even the hardest hit areas are nowhere near herd immunity levels and that we are either going to be isolating until a vaccine is created or we can expect to see a lot more death once nonessential people are forced back to work. The third option is, when you take into account that it's approximately as bad as the flu for folks under 40, we let out the young and keep the older folks and the vulnerable inside. This will boost our progress towards herd immunity without materially increasing the death counts.
      • slg 7y ago
        I have never heard of any healthy person under 40 dying from purely the flu. COVID-19 is certainly less dangerous to the young than the old, but there are plenty examples of it killing young and otherwise healthy people.
        • TheBlight 7y ago
          See: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html Search for "Table 1: Estimated influenza disease burden, by age group — United States, 2018-2019 influenza season"
• badfrog 7y ago
  > New York City had the highest positive rate at 21.2%. The potential good news to come to light is that the death rate may be far lower than some estimates, at 0.5%. How do they get to 0.5%? According to NYC data if you include "probable" cases, 15,400 people, or 0.18% of the population, are already dead. Wouldn't that imply 0.9% fatalities if the whole city was infected?
  • guscost 7y ago
    It would not be ruled as a significant factor leading to death in many of those cases, and for the rest, NYC residents might be more at risk due to higher average viral dose (subways). Also there is a lag in IgG antibody production, the test has imperfect sensitivity, and some portion of exposed people may never develop detectable antibodies. Some of these confounding variables are probably baked into the estimate.
    • badfrog 7y ago
      > some portion of exposed people may never develop detectable antibodies. Interesting. Would those people still develop some form of immunity/resistance?
      • guscost 7y ago
        I think so, but I'm not an expert. See discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22958660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22958660
  • schrodinger 7y ago
    Maybe that’s including the large number of deaths that are presumed COVID but weren’t officially confirmed by a test?
  • kevindong 7y ago
    The data that NYC publishes daily is super interesting since it breaks down cases/deaths by race, gender, age (group), and presence of underlying health conditions [1]. The gist of it is that the majority of deaths from COVID-19 were suffered by people who had some kind of other health issue. As of the most recent data (April 22 at 6pm), 61 deaths were from people with no underlying health issues, 7,474 from people known to have underlying health issues, and 2,755 from people with unknown status [0]. The elderly in poor health are much more likely to die than the young in poor health. But when healthy, the elderly have pretty close to the same fatality rate as the young [2]. [0]: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-daily-data-summary-deaths-04232020-1.pdf https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-d... [1]: Bottom of this page: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page [2]: Cross reference this with [0]: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-daily-data-summary-04232020-1.pdf https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-d...
• CydeWeys 7y ago
  > This still is not a random sampling. It only samples from shoppers at grocery stores and big-box retailers. Imagine doing the same study, but of people who ordered groceries online only. Would you expect to see big differences in exposure rate? I think so. There's a larger, related problem with this: It's way over-sampling people who go outside a lot and make unnecessary trips, and undersampling people who don't. I'm in NYC and I'm only going to one store a week (the grocery store). So I'd have much less chance of being included in this study than someone who hasn't changed their habits and is still shopping much more frequently. And there's a direct correlation between how often you're going shopping and how likely you are to have been exposed to COVID-19. So yeah, it's very far from a random sampling, and it is specifically over-sampling people who are more at risk. So I'd take it with a grain of salt; it could actually be way off. They should've activated the jury selection tool for this and gone to people's apartments to draw blood. That way they'd correctly sample the people who aren't leaving home at all, or only do so rarely.
• capkutay 7y ago
  > This still is not a random sampling. It only samples from shoppers at grocery stores and big-box retailers. Imagine doing the same study, but of people who ordered groceries online only. Would you expect to see big differences in exposure rate? I think so. I'd expect people who still do their own grocery shopping and go to big box retailers to be a better sample of the population than hacker news' audience definition (ordering from instacart/whole foods, working on Zoom/slack all day). The vast majority of the population does not have the privilege that many people in the tech industry do. Going to a grocery store is a pretty basic activity in most of the population. People who get their groceries delivered online and can maintain their livelihood being on Zoom calls all day are probably statistically insignificant enough to be covered in the sampling error.
  • mantap 7y ago
    It's not black and white. A person who goes to the store more often has a greater chance of being tested, than someone who goes infrequently. There's also the issue that people are trying to avoid other human beings right now, including the human beings administering tests. People who are social distancing more effectively are less likely to agree to a test.
• mirimir 7y ago
  Sure, but it's still data for the groups that they sampled. It would be better to have data for truly random samples. But even then, you'd want demographic data for each subject. And then you could compare appropriate subsets of the results with this study. With such data, you could explore risk factors, effectiveness of quarantines, and so on.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• not_a_moth 7y ago
  Except your hypothetical "never leave house" population is probably <5% of the population - every single person I know is still going out to public places at some time during the week.
• Mikeb85 7y ago
  I literally made the same comment a few days ago but here goes: every thread about a study such as this one is has criticisms concerning the scientific accuracy even though all these studies point to the same conclusion and not one of them provide evidence to the contrary. This isn't exact science, we're in the middle of a pandemic. But all these antibody studies are pointing towards the same conclusion.
  • smacktoward 7y ago
    Do they all use the same testing mechanism? If they do, a flaw in that mechanism could result in them all being incorrect or misleading in the same way(s).
  • DeonPenny 7y ago
    I can't believe people are still screaming false results at this point every single random sampling has been the same or point to more infections. At this point based on everyone's method of random sampling that should merit the badge of random sampling, but people argue it on every post.
    • chasd00 7y ago
      I agree. I'm not a conspiracy nut but it's getting hard to ignore the feeling ulterior motives are at work here.
• tigershark 7y ago
  The biggest problem looking at these tests is that they are completely on the opposite side compared to the mortality estimated using South Korea numbers. We know for a fact that South Koreans tracked pretty much every single person with covid given that their new cases are increasing by a single digit per day. We know that as of today they have 10708 cases and 240 deaths, with still 1967 active cases. This give us a lower bound for the mortality at 2.2%. I think this is the best way to estimate mortality and I think that a lot of studies are giving numbers for the infected that are just out of touch with reality. I remember an Oxford study that was saying that half the UK was infected at the beginning of April. Those numbers were simply insane. I still don’t have a perfect explanation why the mortality numbers from the antibody tests seem so low, but I think that the accuracy of these tests or the way they select the people to be tested may be involved. Do you see any flaw in using South Korea numbers to calculate the mortality?
  • FiberBundle 7y ago
    South Korea apparently has conducted 11500 tests/ 1m population. It's ridiculous to claim that they detected every covid case and to suggest that their cfr is a lower bound for the ifr.
    • tigershark 7y ago
      They tested everyone that was in contact with a reported case, I never claimed that they tested the whole population. How do you explain that they are showing only a single digit increase of new cases per day if, as you assert, there is a huge number of unaccounted cases?
      • FiberBundle 7y ago
        Probably by implementing strict quarantine measures at the start of the pandemic. They likely had many undetected cases in the beginning as well, the quarantine reduced the pool of infected people a lot. Given that the number of infected people is relatively low right now, their testing capacity probably allows for fairly good tracing of cases, which is one of the primary reasons why their numbers remain low, in addition to factors such as social distancing and high hygiene standards. But the large number of undetected cases in the beginning would would reduce the ifr significantly.